Like many in Argentina, psychiatrist Martín
Reynoso was raised Catholic. But as time went on, his approach to
the modern world began to involve meditation and
mindfulness.

BUENOS AIRES — I am a Buddho-Christian —
thoroughly, and literally. I've kept my family's basic Christian
casing, but found I needed more than that in this contemporary
world. Thus, like so many people today, I embraced certain Buddhist
principles. And I must say, I find them enormously helpful and
enriching. This is why I say I have a Buddho-Christian mind. It has
a powerful Christian base, but with certain secular principles of
Buddhism that I embraced, little by little, in an effort to simply
feel better.

My basic Christian framework is fairly robust.
My father was a seminarian who nearly became a priest (and luckily
did not), had three nun sisters and a very devout dad who practiced
the Catholic rites. Though both my father and mother, who was also
very Catholic, I assimilated the Roman Apostolic religion in all
its purity but without the rigidity or severity I noticed in some
families in our neighborhood.

The progression toward the Catholic sacraments
and rituals were a leitmotiv of my childhood and youth, though I
was fortunate not to be trapped in a hermetic or self-sufficient
system that distanced me from friends and neighbors. Our
neighborhood was a space where strict or dogmatic beliefs regularly
lost ground to drinking, free speech and youthful irreverence in
all its manifestations. Life gushed forth in so many forms and
colors beyond anything the scriptures would stipulate as right or
commendable. At times I even found this a little
disturbing.

I learned a lot from my friends, neighbors and
immediate environment as I wound my way through the streets without
strict hours or parental discipline. All this constituted the first
blow to the structure of my Christian foundations. I had to
negotiate between ethical values and the malleable rules of
adaptation; between spotless good deeds for others and fierce
competition between the generations; and between repressing the
sexual impulse and seducing even more brazenly on the street. I
understood that I must, slowly, soften my hard religious nucleus to
be happy.

I began saying as a young man what I had
criticized in others as a teenager, namely that, "I believe in God
but do not practice regularly." Mass on Sunday and habitual
celebrations began to fade as I became a more rational, scientific
man. That was the second step.

Science and secularization

Gradually science came to permeate all my
life. As I took my distance from the Catholic religion (in the
general context of secularization), I moved closer — and with some
fervor — to the principles of the scientific vision of the world.
Objectivity, and the need to explain and duly contrast everything,
became a central component of my thinking.

I grew more skeptical, not to mention more
rigid. People can adopt certain airs of superiority when they begin
expressing the scientific vision as nothing short of reality,
without realizing that it is just one way of seeing and explaining.
Causality was the main rule of my life at the time, and everything
had to be explained on the basis of the most direct and rational
vision of phenomena.

It helped me begin a fuller
life.

At our psychology department, the dilemma was
between physics, the scientific model, and psychological science.
We spent much time trying to establish a more flexible conceptual
framework with new methods and approximations in studying the
complex "human creature." But then, a health problem led me to the
next phase.

Mindfulness and its
principles

I came to know mindfulness when I fell ill.
While their use in science is detached from their ideological and
religious origins, the principles of Buddhism shine through like a
background that clarifies the vision we gradually build.

Practicing meditation helped me start
connecting with my body and fully live through it, cleanse it of
tensions, and recognize those rigid thoughts of mine (some of
Christian origin) and the dualist morality that generated guilt and
sometimes pain in me. It helped me begin a fuller life.

Concepts like impermanence, the illusions of
the mind (which work like filters we do not perceive), the source
of suffering and the compassionate way to work with that, and
especially reeducating our mind with a simple but impeccable
system, came to profoundly affect me, and I continue to try and
integrate these with my original conception of the world and its
events.

I feel happy with this choice, though I still
feel I have a long way to go before I adjust my life to these
principles. Which is why I say I have a Buddho-Christian mind, like
so many other people seeking their own wellbeing today. I do not so
much see this as hybridization as an overriding integration of
principles to attain the main objective of any human being: to be
happy.